Current Debates over North American free trade focus almost exclusively on economic issues. Advocates claim that a trilateral agreement will provide impetus for sustained, long-term economic growth in Canada, Mexico, and the United States — and that it will provide a regional counterweight to the European Community (EC) and to Japan. Critics in the United States claim that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will encourage the export of US investment and employment to Mexico. Canadians fear accelerated debilitation of vulnerable sectors of the national economy, from natural gas to automobile parts. Skeptics in Mexico predict that NAFTA will perpetuate low wages for the Mexican working class and transform the entire country into a massive maquiladora.

As in most presidential election years, Latin America is not significant in the campaign issues presently under discussion, nor is it likely to become so before November 1992. This article focuses, therefore, not so much upon which issues might, or even should, be emphasized by the Democratic Party during the campaign, as upon what might be the design of a Latin American policy by a new Democratic administration in January 1993. Start, then, by assuming a Democratic victory in November.

It would be reasonable to predict that Latin America will get more attention, of a different nature and on a more consistent basis, than it has during the Reagan-Bush years. The Democrats have had the affiliation of the greater number of this country's Latin Americanists, and their weight will be felt. They will want, demand, and probably get, some serious input.

History will record the almost-frenzied pace with which negotiators from Mexico, the United States, and Canada have proceeded to draft a treaty that will change drastically the nature of economic relations among the three nations. Three nations with severe social and economic problems, declining competitiveness in the global economy, and virtually no plans for remedying their domestic shortcomings have rushed to drop their borders. Ironically, this act will further reduce their ability to provide domestic remedies for their current problems. It casts these three economies into the unpredictable winds of free trade precisely at a time when a truly-conservative policy would have dictated economic reform at home and efforts to resolve, first, the major domestic crises in each.

The Purpose of this essay is to outline, at least in part, the Latin America agenda of the Republican Party for the 1990s as it appears to me. The subject is both timely and important. However, I can claim no special insight in this regard and, given the nature of the two parties, no one has, or really could, authorize my effort. Such an endeavor probably requires roughly equal measures of analysis, and speculation with respect to the future course of events here in the United States, within the region and around the globe. Given these caveats, I am pleased to try to lay out the Hemispheric policy agenda which I believe that the Republican Party should, and will, follow during the decade to come. Although my partisan sympathies will undoubtedly shine through, I can only hope that my viewpoints will not diverge too greatly from those of my esteemed friend and colleague, Ambassador Ambler H. Moss.

The Supposed emergence of a New World Order has quickly become one of the cliches of the 1990s. First enunciated by President Bush in the context of US attempts to mobilize international support for the Gulf War, the phrase has already been defined and redefined in countless journalistic analyses of recent events in Eastern Europe, the Gulf itself and lately of course the Soviet Union. This is not the place to add directly to that debate. It is obvious that the world order of the 1990s is very different from the post-1945 order. Briefly expressed, it is constituted by the interplay between, on the one hand, a new but still unequal diffusion of power between the core states of the world (the United States, the European Community [EC], and Japan) and, on the other, a new concentration of power in the hands of international capital.

In an Effort to extend and accelerate regional cooperation and coordination in the “War on Drugs” in the Western Hemisphere, President George Bush hosted a widelypublicized, regional, anti-drug presidential summit in San Antonio (Texas) on 26-27 February 1992. This cumbre was conceived as an expanded sequel to the first “Andean” drug summit held in Cartagena (Colombia) on 15 February 1990. In addition to the original four-country participants in Cartagena I — the United States, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia — Ecuador, Venezuela, and Mexico attended Cartagena II as well.

Despite the Mexican regime's track record of adaptiveness, the 1980s seemingly altered the nature of political reform there. Secular, conjunctural, and policy trends attenuated traditional reformist mechanisms (i.e. the regime's capacity to co-opt, or corruption's “lubricating” potential), exposing a series of wrenching political dilemmas and potentially zero-sum equations. The watershed presidential election of July 1988 and the continuing challenge posed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solórzano's PRD (Parttdo de la Revolutión Democrática) both reflected and crystallized these quandaries, magnifying the need and inherent dangers of reforming the one-party system. Yet during the ensuing years, and contrary to unwieldy predictions and scenarios, the regime neither unraveled (see Wiarda 1988/89), capitulated before a Cárdenas-led electoral or revolutionary front, nor stagnated. Instead it rebounded, raising new questions about Mexico's political future.

Although Poland and Mexico differ in many important respects, certain notable similarities in their historical patterns of development and in their geopolitical contexts have invited several attempts to compare the two systems (Hughes, 1986; Croan, 1970; Gentleman and Zubek, 1992 forthcoming). Despite the substantial economic potential of each country, each has had only uneven success in economic development. Each has undergone repeated economic setbacks in spite of having undertaken epic initiatives, particularly in the area of industrialization. In the political realm, although both countries have manifested a passionate nationalist ethos in the past, neither society has proved able to develop a modern democratic system.

The Moment of Truth has come for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The US Congress will have to stop talking and vote to accept or reject the agreement negotiated among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The disagreement on NAFTA in the United States is about free trade with Mexico, not with Canada. A US-Canada free trade agreement (FTA) already exists.

This controversy over NAFTA has been fierce in the United States, much more so than in Mexico. This comparison speaks volumes about changing attitudes. It was almost unthinkable a decade ago that Mexico would so drastically alter its traditional position of maintaining economic and political distance from the United States. This change would not have been possible but for la decena trágica, the years of the 1980s. Beyond that, Mexico has more at stake in a free trade agreement. It has the smaller economy (about 1/27th that of the United States) so that changes, for better or worse, are magnified.

In September 1989, President Bush outlined a comprehensive, multi-faceted drug control strategy with both national and international dimensions. The strategy focused on reducing both the demand and supply of illicit drugs. Treatment, prevention/education, research, law enforcement, and international efforts are major components of the strategy. An important goal of the strategy was to reduce the amount of illicit drugs illegally entering the United States by 15% within 2 years and by 60% within 10 years. The president refined the strategy and forwarded it to Congress on 25 January 1990 (US-ONDCP, 1990: 49-52, 120-121). The following year, in February 1991, policymakers modified goals to a 20% reduction by 1993 and a 65% reduction by the year 2001 (US-ONDCP, 1991: 15).

Chile is Often portrayed as an exceptional case among recent transitions from authoritarian rule for a number of reasons. It was the last of the "bureaucratic authoritarian" regimes to democratize; the transition followed the timetable and conditions set by the military more closely than in Argentina and Uruguay; the prognosis for economic and political stability seems optimistic relative to the rest of the region. An important reason for Chilean exceptionality was the fact that, unlike in other cases, Chile's business and landowning elites supported the military government to the end. Why did they do so?

The Growth of the illegal, psychoactive drug industry has had a dramatic impact on Colombia. Most studies of the financial effects of this industry — mainly cocaine and its by products, but extending also to marijuana, quaaludes, other psychoactive substances, and, more recently, heroin — have focussed upon trying to estimate its size and determining its impact on the national economy. On the whole, the conclusion of most observers has been that its effects on the latter have been more negative that positive (Kalmanovitz, 1989; Reyes, 1990; Sarmiento, 1990; Urrutia, 1990; Thoumi, 1987).

The Sandinistas celebrated their first party congress on 19 July 1991, the eleventh anniversary of the day of the “Triumph,” but this time the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) had little to celebrate and a lot to worry about. The party that once claimed so surely to be

was now struggling to reconstitute itself as an effective political organization after being ousted from power in 1990 by the population it claimed to represent and lead.

The Literature on democratic transitions suggests two opposite sorts of dangers that the successful democratizer must avoid: too much uncertainty on the one hand, and too little on the other. The first can lead to conflict, violence, and abortive transitions (Karl and Schmitter, 199D; while the second means there is no democracy at all, but leads to something less which has been variously called: "tutelary democracy," "electoralism," or "democradura."

Before the government of Patricio Aylwin took office in Chile in March 1990, most observers anticipated that the return to democracy would bring considerable social conflict and political instability. Expressing a widely held view, one expert wrote: "Any return to democracy in Chile would entail vocal demands, from a variety of social groups and movements, to reverse the policies instituted by the regime since 1973" (Loveman 1986-87:29). The need to confront human rights abuses during the military government was another potentially explosive political issue.

This Article addresses some of the key issues involved in understanding current trade negotiations between Mexico and the United States, as well as their significance for the process of economic integration in North America. These issues derive from the new setting produced by (a) Mexico's trade and investment liberalization in the 1980s, (b) the incentives which underlie the drive towards integration, as well as (c) those factors which will condition the final content of the current negotiating process.

A free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States could be seen as the logical conclusion of the process of trade and investment liberalization carried out by the Mexican government ever since the mid-1980s. At the same time, it also represents a shift in Mexico's initial trade strategy, from multilateralism to bilateralism, or from globalization to regionalization, as a consequence of the global trend, toward the end of the 20th century, to create large regional economic blocs.

In Just 20 Years Peru has shifted from beacon of hope to basket case. As late as the mid-1970s, Peru's reformist military government (1968-1980) appeared to offer significant possibilities for economic and political development (defined as improved distribution of income and greater participation by the citizenry). From 1940 to 1975, economic growth and low inflation had been the norm. A major agrarian reform during the military docenio (12-year rule) created production cooperatives nation wide; the industrial community gave workers a meaningful management role in the operation of their firms. Both stirred the imagination of many Peruvians and the academic community alike.

This Study will explore the extent to which state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were responsible for creating the Latin American debt problem and, more importantly, the extent to which the present privatization of those enterprises may help to resolve that problem. In some quarters, privatization has been viewed as an essential reform needed to restore creditworthiness and growth in the region after the “lost decade” of the 1980s. Other quarters have been more skeptical, viewing it more as the latest fad to strike the region. The conclusion that will be expressed here falls somewhere in between: privatization can indeed play a part in solving the debt crisis and restoring growth, but, like all solutions, it may also create unintended problems down the road if not used carefully.

In 1991, Ecuador's foreign policy had to deal with the revival of its old border conflict with Peru. Nevertheless, this time the situation offered some hope — in contrast to previous occasions, the most recent being the Paquisha incident in 1982 — that the longstanding impasse between the two countries, which had hindered closer cooperation and greater integration for decades, might be nearing some sort of resolution at last.

During the first two years of his administration, President Rodrigo Borja and his Foreign Minister Diego Cordovez were primarily concerned with incorporating Ecuador into some of the Latin American efforts at international cooperation — political, economic, and commercial — which had emerged during the 1980s, such as the Rio Group, or which had been redefined and advanced in new, more creative forms, such as those exemplified by the Cartagena Group, the Asociación Latinoamericana de Integratión (ALADI), the proposed Andean Free Trade Zone, and the like.

Brazil Entered the 1990s with its transition from authoritarian rule incomplete. The gradual withdrawal of the armed forces from power brought an end to over two decades of direct military rule in 1985, paving the way for a new constitution and the first presidential election in nearly 30 years. These formal democratizing changes were erected, however, on a foundation of socio-economic structures and political institutions with some decidedly non-democratic features. As a result, Brazilian politics retains some important vestiges of authoritarianism. Pre-existing centers of power in society remain extraordinarily influential within the emerging system, frequently operating beyond the reach of even nominal democratic control or oversight.

If events of the 1980s did not completely transform Brazilian politics, they did redefine the main challenge of the political transition. The initial problem of replacing the military government with a civilian regime has given way to a second, less tangible, task of consolidating democratic institutions and procedures (O'Donnell, 1988).